User:Josve05a/Signpost draft2
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Sixteen Years in Limbo: The Request That Time Forgot
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The year was 2009. Wikipedia was barely eight years old and still wobbling through adolescence. Wikimedia Commons, at only five years old, was smaller and scrappier, powered by volunteers who were still figuring out what a "structured and scalable free media repository" was supposed to look like.
Much has changed since then. Millions of files have been uploaded, millions deleted. new editors ahs joined our ranks, many has since left. But somehting still remain the same, such as how to nominate a file for deletion.
In the ordinary course of things, Deletion Requests are meant to be open for seven days. Sometimes they stay open longer if there is a backlog. As of this writing, the median age of open DRs is 15.9 days. Occasionally, a tricky one lingers for a month or two.
But sixteen years is another category entirely.
On 24 November 2025, a short note appeared on the Commons Administrators' noticeboard together with a link:
- DR have been open for 16 years
"Could we give the DR the peace it deserves?"
— Trade
The link pointed to Commons:Deletion requests/File:Henry Louis Gates, Jr. mugshot.jpg, a discussion opened during the Obama administration, back when mobile editing meant hoping your browser would survive loading a large page on a your recently bought iPhone 3GS.
Sixteen years later, the request had never been closed. Not archived, not forgotten, but somehow still waiting.
Within minutes, an administrator stepped in with a simple closure:
"gone. thanks"
— Bedivere
A deletion request that had waited through three U.S. presidents, multiple rounds of Commons RfAs and de-RfAs, and more than a decade and a half of on-wiki evolution finally came to an end.
Editors marked the occasion with quiet amusement. One noted that the DR was old enough to apply for a driver's license. Another hoped this was the longest open DR on record. A third thanked Trade for finally giving the nominator the peace of mind they deserved.
It also raises an eyebrow or two, including mine as a Commons administrator. We Commons users are regularly accused of being copyright paranoiacs who delete anything that even hint at being "creative" (such as a portrait simply wearing a T-shirt with som design). By that standard, the real mystery is not that the DR was closed in 2025, but that it lived undisturbed since 2009.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from this, it is that Commons is vast. Vast enough that a single DR can drift across years and generations of contributors. Vast enough that a routine maintenance task can turn into a tiny piece of institutional archaeology. And vast enough that, every now and then, someone finds a corner that time forgot and sets things right with a few clicks.
A small fix, many years overdue. And now, at last, this DR is closed and at rest.
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